.
After childhood sleep,
Of days into dawning,
Shucked of dusted clay,
Eyes set unto fawning,

Then, the rowing began.
Shy gentle waves lulling
As it does for Everyman
Who seeks loves' culling.

In a tempest of blue sky,
I was engulfed so plain,
That time was sore to eye,
All suitors never maidens.

One true love never came,
Nor to fly as birds teeming,
Now all is shipwreck of age,
Ah, but to drown dreaming.

( Sonnet )*

We walked along the grainy ocean,
Our way, smooth as a path to nowhere
And through a dance of reeds your hair,
Steeped with marshes of wings and air,
Red, mellow as fire from the fallen sun,
Your flowered dress was the first spring
Ever germinating and blue crystal waters
Sprung, of coastal pools, Knockanare wells
And I was flung, as a windy clutch of seeds
Dreaming, your voice, bloomy, song wafted,
Rousing, as remembrance in fragrances —
And the moony, blinking stars soon peopled
Our woe-less eyes, full of sleep and vision
And all the stones held us deep as sarsen.

In the eyes' corner,
Dull and deep, drenched
In dream with hair running
Within the longest song of breeze,
Where bones decay and flesh
Evaporates, there and when,
Cleansed in flash, eternal
Flame, is where we met.

.
In a bed
Of flowers
We make love.
Your freed lips
Are the colour
Of heat, wildness
As they enclose
In the bare outer
Gardens, untamed,
Clearings in a wood
And the tongued tangles
Of your unmiring hair
Are the very fragrances
Of innocence
And bloom.

Under the shy stars
We swim in a meadow
Of touch and dream,
Our eyes flickering
Like those sky jewels
Set in balm of heavens,
The night covering
All that we desire,
Flesh and home,
Glittering,
Are one.

.
When you touch,
It is withholding.
When you moan,
It is suffering.
When you smile,
It is mercy.
When you laugh,
I am placated.
When you swoon,
I am not there.
When you vibrate,
I only witness.
When you taste,
I only imagine.
When you love,
I am unknown.

When you sleep,
I do not exist.
When you wake,
I am in dream.
When you cry,
It is like beauty.
When you leave,
There is desolation.
When you arrive,
The lost are found.
When you pray,
The birds take wing.
When you dance,
The world opens.
When you break,
I am complete.

The whole world is a sea—
A great ball of green blue eye
Watching the skies with a watery
Gleam in the round and swirling
Aye, the sea is a sauce, quivering
In the bowl of heaven and clouds
Are blushing with rivers run flushing
Waters older than the gold of stars,
Into the sea.  I see that hushed time
Is flowing as it all revolves with tides
And birds, white as snow and foams
Pure as dreamed downy wind, wings
Long, sure, set for a choppy pilgrim's
Sea journey, swaying with the stages,
Always breezy, sliding as fish do flying
In her rounding depths and her gusty
Crests and all are riddled as mariners
Who travel on her spindrift ways, days
Of the dizzying sun and steamy springs,
We all go step into deepest end, darkling
Fathoms of slip, those eventual afterwhens,
Riding the sunk, fabled under-ocean streams,
In mangled kelps of weeds, into the murky wave.

.
In whisper— shadow sings a song.
My call is joined within the hollows,
Only tiny dimpled crests of the sea,
My voice is for rains, round familiar
As patch into tune of old shattering
Light.  I search for love, sloe in slips
Thru ******* eyes, outcast beyond
And ghostly move into monumental
Futilities of unbearing, leery in flesh
Undeciphered.  Make me one lattice
To bind the wind and mark shallows
Mine as I trudge into black, blue sun.
This song— I sing is for lost keeping,
Hear my hush as it breaks for darks—
And I shall love in box, buried, forgot,
Kept at one sight so grave, remaining
As smudge onto stone burnt in a dial
Etched by firing rays of timeless star,
Hear my song— whispers of shadow.

( in honour of Memorial Day )*

By the dawn's early light,
Casual ties of warring pride,
Who wear the fit of uniforms,
Creasing down the seamy streets,
Who once in his sights were called to order,
By arrow clutching eagles, sandbagged
By the rivers heart of darkness, *****-
Trapped by bootstraps pulled, torn apart
In tiger eyeing fields that lied
In wait while choppers dived, delivering
Payloads of giant dragon flied fire
And this unction was to be their balm
And the swordless Dons were spit out
Of skull hunting windmills, Jonah
Beached to thy kingdom cong.

And over their heads cried the phantom
Jets, bat out of helmet, to the straw
Pulling hairs and these heroes, we
Abandoned without bonds nor blindfold
And lashed them to the flagging pole
With guns saluting while the sirens
Wailed, no wonder they should crack,
Our green jaded Gods, our Greek
Journeymen, due south of lotus land,
No wonder they should break on the China
Seas in that cold, ******* land.
O say can you see, that it is we,
The people, in anger and in shame
Who have no mettle, to give, but tarnish
Foisted on the brave and they
Are worn, like trinkets to dishonor.

And over the deep non-ending sank
Our heroes, betrayed by ism's, discharged
By ghosts in the machining guns,
Unspirited by a corporeal world,
Bamboozled in the muddy thickets
And dropped to the fray on ****** wings,
To foreign soil, where children are lost
In the man eating groves and they
Were thus dutifully numbered by their own
****** arms and all were made
Guilty cold in that sliver of uncivil
And polar eyed land, O say can you see,
The burning of twilights last gleaming?
And, we sutured a wall for the trigger-
Happy dead, we dammed the bleeding,
But can there be no bridges?

And further from those chilling fields
They are casting us letters, address
Unknown and mid adrift are messages
In drowning bottles by the waysides,
They are swimming to our doors,
Where, we the people, have built a wall,
Made of stone, black and shiny, it will
Not smear— and we are polishing off
Our dead, say the cold blooded
Behind that face and in front runs a red
River running down the vane, glorious sun,
Yet, this humble partition, in stories and tears,
Is deconstructing grave white heads,
Quartered in pride and darts to the ground,
That warring bird, crowned to his vacant
Lots.  O— say can you see, the turning
Of twilight's last gleaming?

( cailín rua dearg )*

Your lips, soft and full,
Are tearing at my heart.
Your skin, freckled and bumped,
Is at play with my palms.
Your eyes, of water and stone
Rain, storming like fists of hail.
Your *******, are blooms, pouring
Like white chocolate cupped.
Your hair, is a loom even
Penelope could not weave.
Your little feet, are drumming
Like puddles by the sea.
Your thighs, make me mutter
And sigh into the winds.
I will, not go wondering now
For whom is master and who
Is slave, are you the Morgen
Or are you Fand my gentle
Ocean wave?  Your voice
Is song, your breath is air
And your pooling, marbled
Face, torso, hair, how they beckon
And your words, gifting melody,
Such words must be forbidden.

Odd boxes,
Patch the room.
Small plates of food
Half eaten, dusted,
With leftover crumbs and papers.
The phone never calls
And shades are drawn for days
Only opening for small, dropping lights
That move in the eves.

I can
Not look at all the photographs I took
Of us
Even though I want to,
Even though they lie
Close to me
With my unmade bed, on the floor
Always falling,
But never to sleep, without you,
Empty.

.
From their private jets,
The primal privileged
Spot a spark earthwards,
The glint of the rolling
Out of guillotines.

Guillotines so tall, waiting,
Just for them and they know
It was coming, as they know
They have it coming.

The rabble they so despise,
Yet pander for as they pull
Wool and leave all in cold,
The wretched who someday
Read injustice in the leaves,
The Princes of sham, cloven,
Always bearing woven bags,
Carpet dreams of desperate,
Down trodden, never fearing
To be trampled, till the blade
Is shining in the searing light
Of new day.

For retribution is a fable
The reptilian upper classes
Are cold to see as it strikes,
Their forked tongues,
Eventual as slimy winter
Strangles themselves
In a hollow cave,
Unmarked.

Even the dirt is soiled
With their fame, their
Scaled names, even
Sun will not shine
On the bloodied blots
They have wrought.

Such murderous stiffs,
Who enslaved all warmth
And empathizers in a rug
Fit for a tomb.  And all their
Art as false as they!

The earthy shall rise
And salt their mortal
Wounds, songs will not be sung
For the indifferent masters
Who now pour into streets
Made for severed muck.

The only beauty they left:
Opulent, soppy-red coiffured heads
As they roll on the potholed,
Sooty pavements.

In my darkest hour, by the rage of sun,
I met her in a shower of April days,
Riding to the moon in twined études,
The dry chrysalis of winter shells
Gave way to lightness, glaze,
The rain in our eyes, amaze,
Her voice as it fluted, broke,
Like feathers from a wandering bird,
Were my wings of iridescence and joy
And we were blind when we were born,
We were blind as bells of floating grace,
Lived forever by such a new shore,
Such ends of buzzing time,
As May flies.

.
In the lowland fens at the worlds end,
Like the ferryman, a blue heron waits,
Eyes of dragon fly, hover, over still water,
His legs are the oars rowing to the dead.

Are we but dream junkies
And all the stars that trail,
In the gloams of milky ways,
But empty islands more for us,
Golden archipelagoes, baubles
Ringing, rounding out heavens'
Wreathing, oceans, nil vastness
To fixate upon from whence we
Once were, by souls' fashioning,
Airy and unrealistic as dear fools'
Child-minded convictions, fables,
Foetal, in smoky amniotic aethers,
Wisps of matter to see unlocked,
Unchained from sparks of nothing,
Wide eyed as supernovae in voids,
As light injects into us such purpose,
Imaginations so neatly dreamed upon,
Once and for all, stories bound in sleepy
Times, or tis more our sole, sun, but one
Dim light in all these unsettled sparklings,
A tapestry which etches our righting eyes,
Into sandy itchings, spiral notches, grains
Ticking us eternal to vested lime beds waiting,
Are we sunk in drunkeness by the overheaded
Skies, fumbling about, numbed, slumbered
In soul rummages?

.
Into her eyes I dove,
I did not know it was
The deepest end,
Of a pool so vast,
All the blood of veins
Could not fill,
Yet poured into.

Into her lips I sank,
Buried alive at day,
My arms struggled
Limp, to hold on,
My body quivering
In the moist rains
That lovers drown in.

Into her flesh I came,
My burial at sea.

Blueberry picking was no chore.
When I was too young to do many things
Well and fishing with my father's
Father, I discovered all kinds of stuff
I wasn't good at, like how to read
Ripples, or tackle slippery eels, or even how to clean
Spiny perches.  'Where are the hungry fish?'
Grandfather would spout at me, all the green pools
Were liars and cheats and patience,
Was another one of my shortcomings,
Not only this, my father hoped his trades
On me, but like a conflicted carpenter
I was in love with trees.

This all left me wondering just what
I might do, that is until I plumbed my first
Blueberry.  In the hoary-head of blue things,
Stuff was easy, and ripe for the picking,
Bunching blue-baubles in baskets over-ripened
Of berries.   On special mornings, due southwest
In lazy hills, round my home, — bells  
Were breaking, in quiet sections of the Canton,
Massachusetts woods, and playing by them,
We rounded blue notes, some friends and I,  
Plucked-out tunes to the breeze, on leafy-
Instruments, and pulled our weight, into moil-moisted  
Bushels, (one batch of blue was more than a ton  
Of any other fruit!)  
Toiling, till the sky would peek  
And spill its hue.  Foragers were we, as teaming
Minnows round a polk-a-dot reef, feasting on some great  
Blue-Fin’s roe, brave savages, painted in the glow of ember-
Light, of burnished yellows, and bushy-blanched browns
Drenched by dew and dappled in the stipple
Of sun-brushed fire, all the colours making patterns, even  
Box Turtles knew.   How merry it was we made our labors,
Why it was wicked!  And muggy from the heat of cool  
Indigo stars, we squenched our thirst, in glugs  
Of kisses, each following the greatest by far,  
And one soft day, we did notice the crown
Of a Princess, set on top of each full  
Noble-blooded faery-pearl dropped
As if to commemorate all  
The things that were worth  
Knowing, stuff that was ripe,  
Easy, and rapt
In blue.

Gray gathering  
Signs fell on the musty register.  Two pallid  
Faces infatuate, braiding the ley lines,
Were married in a dimly lit registry.
Outside, the sky in Dublin was a dark pool,  
The clouds were omen, birds, startled in  
Your eyes, a flashing flue of doves, all wings  
A warring coo, escaping into the dusk.

We walked a ways to that room of dreams
And dined in the Shelbourne’s Aisling room.
I was Ormond, I was Yeats and you  
Were gone. Your happy tears were notes singing
Our sorrows that day.  Our love was castaway  
Our love was time bomb.  Crossing stars, we trembled  
As we talked. Two birds setting sights on some  
Lost ocean’s horizon.  
  
                          When first we met,  
At the meeting hall, cradled in a tempest  
Eye, you gave me your name and it burned on  
The paper as it now burns in my mind  
Like Brigid’s fire.  At once, once, we were one.
Conjoined yet neither one of us a joiner.  
Anointed under the votive stars violently  
Innocent your heart, a spike, my heart  
A rail.  Our love was charmed, our love was time,  
Balm.  To what end this new beginning?

.
If ever a man, who saw the gentle
Gifts given, freely, ripeness on branches,
Fortunate blooms by the minuscule clover,
Sun showers in the dances of the yellow
Bees, wisdoms ringing in spirals of ancient
Trees, a man might then be sorely moved
As the crushing work a day world hushes
His spirit, a man might dream of peace
And not sail capsized by navy grey suit,
Slogging in oceans of paper deadlines,
In girding grids, grind of lonely streets,
But know of graces in sauntered day,
Hear the in-songs of long unsuffering
Birds as they jaunt through the leaves,
A spirit might wake into light and still
Be dreaming and not limp wounded
In step of site, petrified salt of job
And unforgiven city, if ever a man
Was a man, born in embodiment
Of perpetual joys and not a toy
Tossed by the hollow spirits
Of the brood indifferent.

Without speech,
Former lovers meet,
At a party and are reintroduced
To themselves. In that mute
Moment, eyes carry words down
To hands that are unwishing,
Unmoved to join, yet touch
Haphazardly in the cacophony
Of dark party.  The former lovers
Lips are locked in air, unmoist,
Their hearts beat to the tuneless
Drone of old music and stale bread,
Their bodies fuddle in a tortuous groove,
At the reception they could not get out
Of attending.  In a split second, they pray,
It will be unquick, yet soon, just over.

The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.

( Sonnet)*

How can my lips survive,
The wait of beamed kisses,
From your green, fey eyes,
Pinned, blind by the sun?
O like scarlet dipping into
Seas, your lips are setting
All the skies aflame in dusk
From them, my poor body
Suffering to explore yours,
Heavenly eyes, unearthly,
Bodies ****** lips to dream,
Merest, only dream. Pray
Tell me surest, sweetest lie,
How can my lips survive?

.
Nature cut her ties,
The stem wanders,
Petals splay in wind,
Woman spreads open,
Man needles so within,
Fruit will come, to drop,
After loves have spoken
And the new walking limbs
Of ripeness that leaves out,
Shall branch into us, light,
Under a sun which seethes,
In the salt of the scorn flesh,
The petals of woman alive,
Such nectar that man must
Halve of himself into world
And kind release, breakings
With water unto high earthly
Being and lands unknown,
Like a Phoenix after ashes,
In a shower of clay, dried
Yet bountiful with bloods
Streaming to the afterdays
Of progeny and old hatch,
To hold with stars as chaos
Falls, seeding casted comes,
Liquids into spinning births.

.
Notes wash over
The no angled ear
Listener, journeyer
See trails leading
To a cloud of sun,
Break in the skies,
Soon to know again
What was creeping
In the eyes of restless
Thought, unrequited
Sense, the whirling
Ride in the globes
Of vertigo and touch.

Dismembered by mood,
The musician conjures
Lost jewels in thought,
Sparks to the mind,
Sorcery in the bland,
Wayout, man, you dig,
Tap the deep rythmns
Drowning under toes,
Shutters we have lined
Go ourselves together
In the blinds.  Turn on,

Off those penny eyes,
The horn careening
In its heights of low
Down blues and sheen,
Be bop and stirring
In a rush, unfinished
The player knows
Your got number,
Is offbeat, syncopated
With the pearly drums
Of the sheet, read heart.

Jazzman is charmer
To sleepy serpent
Kept, shot in only bars
That leech into night,
The looking glasses
Pouring over misery
Ride sweet nowhere
In the tempos of fix,
Youngling daddy-o,
Plenty is the brass horn
Of Jazz in the clears,
Cool fingers singing
What the mind hears.